Report from Minsk new media festival transit 0.1 By
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MINSK PAKA
Paka is Russian for leaving, lets go. Leave. To leave is often the only way to
survive.
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Minsk is still an undiscovered Gotham city frozen in time.
Belarussia is the soviet Disneyland of Europe, the recent presidential
elections in September with an official 87% voting in the elections and 75 %
for sitting president Alexander Lukashenka is a reflexion of this trend.
The high percentages are taken from the creative statistics of the past and are
a manifestation of the cementation of bonapartist rule. The president has the
power and also control over majority of media; the ideology seems to be a mix
of soviet nostalgia and pure presidential cult. Yes the president is a hockey
player. Yes he is a self made man. He is like a father over ten million
people. The glue holding society together seems to be the fact that the ruling
party is keeping the living costs down and employment high. To pay, they print
new money.
This has created a galloping inflation: one year ago you got 1000 rubles for
one dollar- today its 1500. But things are never as the look like. Vodka,
hockey and circus will not keep the situation stable in the long run. The
stagnation put on the whole society as a result of presidential ideological
monopoly will in the long run undermine the presidential power structure even
if it can use inflation, weapon-export and for the moment the world situation
as stabilizers for its existence. The Billboards where gaping empty on the road
from the airport:
The only adds where banners celebrating the firemen and police-officers of
Belarussia.
So long as the US and Europe fear the Taliban and other fundamentalist extreme
groups it means x-mas times for regimes like the sitting president. It's the
responsibility of the international new media community not to forget or leave
the Minsk scene behind a new iron curtain.
Belarusian artist community has never really broken with the underground
tradition from soviet times and lives an existence in half shadow struggling
against isolation and marginalization and the fact that exile seems to be
nearly the only way to survive and bloom. Stagnation is harsh, stagnation is
grim, and stagnation will eat your hart and brain and pickle it in vodka. But
this is not soviet-times, people can travel, people can access information and
here also a quite new ghost is rooming around society: new media art and
international networking.
The force of history in form of new media will and is changing things: even if
the situation in Minsk can remind of the last decades of soviet stagnation one
thing is for sure: information monopoly is for ever broken. The times when
people where hand-copying or hand printing rare novels are over.
For the second time, the association for contemporary art in Belarussia
organized a new media festival with international guests. The association for
contemporary art in Belarussia is a network of artist and curators that for the
last three years has been the hope for Belarusian arts has not stopped their
energetic efforts to topple isolation.
This year the new media festival took place in the local film-museum. The
festival was a mix of video-installations, screenings and presentations. The
international guests came from WRO festival in Poland, from Riga Sound project
represented by DJ/VJ Lennarts and Valdemars connected to Rixc in Latvia, and
Sweden: artist Jon Brunberg from Stockholm artist group SOC participated with
two projects: one interactive real-time-video-installation first shown at the
Crac show in Stockholm one year ago, and then Jon also presented first Utopian
World Championship 2001, (http://www.soc.nu/utopian a project made by artist-
group soc.
I presented a video-installation: “If I was a Swede a dialogue with the
propaganda-archives of Swedish families”. The work a 55 minutes video that was
produced for a show at TV-galley in Moscow this summer was presented as a video-
installation with a Russian voice-over and texts.
Dimitri Plax Belarussian artist and writer based in Stockholm made a
presentation over Swedish cd-rom projects and his and Karin Hanssons political
non-correct project the confessions of Plax/ Hansson.
The big difference from last year was an increasing number of participants and
wider spectra of new media art projects made in Belarussia. From the advanced
real-time video/audio projects of Andrej Savitsky to funny and clever banners
and gif animations sometimes reminding of Finnish group Katastro.fi projects
but still with a lot of local flavor: the architecture and diagonals of Minsk
are transforming and imploding in digital world.
The festivals also draw attention from local television and press and also from
local design, web and gaming community. Other results were that the European
Humanitarian University will teach about new media arts.
During the festival a concept of next international forum was formulated: Minsk
Temporary Media lab.
In April Minsk Temporary Media Lab will take place. A group of international
artists representing different disciplines will be invited for a Minsk week and
make a project: Look for news about Minsk Temporary Media lab on the list.
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You know things are improving in Belarussia. I met a man that had to go ten
days in prison last year for political crimes. Ten days in a cell 3 x 4 meters
with 12 people in the cell and the prisoners smoking all the time.
-My mother got ten years in Siberia for saying one wrong word against Stalin. I
got ten days.
The man was born in a prison camp in Magadan, his mother still alive and
kicking.
An old Russian saying:
The things that don't kill you make you stronger.
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Nils Claesson
Artist-film-maker and coordinator of the Production Network for Electronic Arts
of Norway and member of the Crac-board.
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